Me and my shadow
by Katowisp
Summary: At the end when the war's won...but the battle is lost. Goku and Sanzo


A/N: Hollar out! K. Firefly begins testing the waters to the Saiyuki world ^^ I've been a big fan for three years now, but only recently have been testing the fanfiction aspects. Expect a bigger story coming from me soon.  
  
Disclalimers: Yes. ...as usual, were I actually...owning these guys...::cackles::  
  
Also! Title comes from the Frank Sinatra song. Feed back ALWAYS appreciated!  
  
Me and my Shadow  
  
The future had dimmed.  
  
There was no goal now, no structure or plan. There was no clear way, just a hazy remembrance of what had been.  
  
There was no more traveling West. It had ended. They had won.  
  
He had lost.  
  
There seemed something wrong with that. To have won the war, but lost what mattered most. Wasn't there a rule, somewhere? Didn't he have three wishes, or at least just one? They'd just saved the world from the brink of certain war and destruction, they would receive no more then a pat on the back and a mention in the history books, perhaps a shrine dedicated to their odd group.  
  
Would he get nothing more than the corpse in his arms?  
  
What would he do now, when the person who had mattered most was gone? He would never have admitted it, of course. He wouldn't have been able to sit down and tell him that he had been his best and only friend, that he'd been able to keep him going when he'd just wanted to give up-another thing he would never had admitted. He was the infallible, corruptible monk who hadn't cared about anyone or anything. 'Just doing his job', right?  
  
When had the boy become so important to him?  
  
The light, easy going attitude. Unlike Hakkai with his dark undertone and uneasy past, unlike Gojyo with his lazy, easy smile to cover his problems, his emotions had always been open, whatever was on his mind painfully obvious.  
  
Somehow, without realizing it, he'd become dependent on that. Come to rely on him to cheer him up, to keep him sane, even if he didn't know what he was doing.  
  
...or maybe he had.  
  
And now he was alone. He had spent so much of his life with the boy who wasn't really a boy at all. Almost every day had been spent in his presence, and half of the time he had acted annoyed.  
  
But he hadn't been.  
  
Not really.  
  
With a past so intertwined, how could he ever have a future so completely absent of his presence? Somehow, he had come to rely on the boy to always be there. Even when everyone else was gone and all else uncertain, he had believed Goku to be there. To walk beside him with his idiotic smile and constant hunger for food, his penchant for fighting.  
  
He, who had sworn to never grow attached, to walk the middle path and care about no one, had somehow completely, and inexplicably come to depend on some boy he'd had to free from the peak of a mountain.  
  
And now...  
  
And now...  
  
There was nothing.  
  
And he *wanted* to give up, he *wanted* to just leave, start over. He wanted to shake the boy, to blame him for dying, to curse him back into life so that he could hit him with his fan and call him an idiot and start to walk off, knowing he'd be right behind him.  
  
He always was. A shadow. He would never leave, because even when the sun begins to set, the shadow is still there, lengthening, stretching into the night.  
  
Already the body had begun to cool, the face relaxed into a peaceful expression that would never have existed naturally. There had been no goodbye, no emotional outpouring where everything that had needed to be said had been finally released. Time hadn't even slowed down. There had just been a pained cry, and he had swiveled just in time to see him go down, there just in time to pull him into his arms and watch the light in his eyes fade, watch them glaze over. There had been no intervention on the gods' part this time.  
  
And Sanzo had never felt so lonely.  
  
~ The end  
  
My first go round at a Saiyuki story I'm actually in the process of writing one and the first chapter should be up soon enough!  
  
But this vignette popped into my head, and I had to write it. It simply wouldn't fit anywhere else.  
  
I was randomly thinking the other day...how lost and hopeless you'd feel, having just lost someone that you've spent so much time with, you can't imagine a future without them  
  
So...  
  
this is dedicated to my close friend Mike who lost his best friend of 18 years in December. 


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